It's always nice to get some confirmation on ideas that
have been (literally) driving me crazy for a few years now.
Now I feel a whole lot more relaxed, and a whole lot more
humble. Big weight gone, now can hack. :)

What I read there and at the TUNES site also confirmed
that my basic design for Figure is sound, so there's no
excuse for me if I flub the implementation.

Anyway, I uploaded the latest GRUB to Debian yesterday. I'll
make the formal alpha release when it hits the mirrors.
Okuji's still doing the lion's share of the work, and he'll
probably continue to do so until 1.0 is out the door (which
shouldn't be very long, judging by his release goals).

I'm pretty sure Figure will be ready for grafting into
GRUB shortly after 1.0, and then the ball will be back into
my court again. It's good to work with Okuji... I just
hope I'm not stressing him too much as I tilt at windmills.

Ahh. Interesting things are developing in this middleware
I call Figure.

Its virtual machine has settled down to something that
has one register (called context) which is a pointer
into a web of nodes. Programming this beast is quite
convenient (to me), because you can navigate and manipulate the nodes as if
they were a filesystem.

Did I mention there's no stack? Tee-hee.

Now I'm implementing the meta-object protocol so that
different namespaces can be linked into the node system,
such as the Unix filesystem, the DNS, machine registers, etc.

All in all, it's one step closer to eliminating the need
for programming languages.

Lately, I've been working on implementing a scripting language
for GRUB, as well as a Guilified version of Bash (which I
call Gush). My philosophy of software development has
matured somewhat, and I'm trying to factor out common
pieces that would be useful for other applications. That's
what Figure is.

So far, it's got a really tiny footprint, a typed
in-memory name system, cooperative threading, a garbage
collector, and a command shell.

Remaining work includes the data translator (used by
the garbage collector), and the language syntax (not a
programming language, just a wrapper for other programming
languages).

I have truly evil plans for this software. I'll announce
it all over the place when I get it nicely packaged up for
you.

Goodness, gracious... reviewing all those names and
certifying people sure takes a long time.

I made a silly mistake and started a new GRUB page. Hopefully, somehow it
will get deleted, and I will claim my rightful spot on the
realGNU GRUB page.

Other than that, I'm quite taken with the idea of a nice
central free software entry point that I can exploit for my
own nefarious purposes. Heheh. Other people's diaries will
probably be the downfall of all free software productivity,
leaving me as the premier hacker.

Or something.

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